Re: Lout and Adobe Acrobat

[Tom Gordon]

>Here's an idea.  Might Lout users benefit from the ability to output
>in Adobe Acrobat format?
>
>rodrigo vanegas
>address@hidden

Yes!  I have no idea how difficult it would be to get Lout to produce
PDF (Portable Document Format, the name of the format used by the Acrobat
viewer) instead of, or in addition to PostScript.  But PDF has considerable
advantages:

1. Previewing.  The free Acrobat reader, available for all popular platforms,
is a very nice viewer.  Much better than any PostScript previewers I have
seen.  Supports full text search and quick random access to any page,
independent of the size of the file.

2. Compact, platform independent representation.  Data is compressed and
encoded in plain ASCII, so there is no need for other programs like
"compress" or "uuencode", which tend to be platform dependent and awkward
to use.

One of the last advantages of TeX over Lout is the wide availability of
good dvi previewers.  PDF output for Lout would close this gap.

Tom Gordon



Dr. Thomas F. Gordon
GMD, FIT-KI; Schloss Birlinghoven
53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany
email: address@hidden
www: http://nathan.gmd.de/persons/thomas.gordon.html
phone: (+49 2241) 14-2665